1.3.12
India & the NSG
As foreign secretary Ranjan Mathai prepares to engage the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) for an eventual Indian membership, New Delhi is signaling that it will press ahead despite the NSG’s decision to constrain transfers of enrichment and reprocessing technology to non-NPT nations. Mathai travelled to Vienna on Wednesday to meet the NSG troika — the US, the Netherlands and New Zealand — along with Venkatesh Varma, who is in charge of disarmament issues in the ministry of external affairs. However, with the US assuming the presidency of the global nuclear body, India’s path towards membership may be easier. The US takes the lead in NSG from June, and the next plenary is planned in Seattle, USA. The Netherlands is the current chair. The Indian quest for membership to the four non-proliferation regimes — NSG, Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), Wassenaar Arrangement and Australia Group — took on a serious tone after the US President Barack Obama formally committed US support to helping India get into these regimes, during his visit to India in November, 2010. Later, India made it clear that it would pursue its membership to all four “in tandem” rather than taking them serially. The US formally raised the question of India’s membership to the NSG at successive plenary meetings in Christchurch, New Zealand and Noordwijk, the Netherlands. To overcome the “problem” of India’s non-accession to the NPT, the US circulated a paper among the NSG members suggesting that India’s NPT membership need not be a “prerequisite”.
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